Dreams Of Earth And Sky
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Dreams of Earth and Sky
Author: Freeman Dyson
language: en
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Release Date: 2015-04-21
In this sequel to The Scientist as Rebel (2006), Freeman Dyson—whom The Times of London calls “one of the world’s most original minds”—celebrates openness to unconventional ideas and “the spirit of joyful dreaming” in which he believes that science should be pursued. Throughout these essays, which range from the creation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century to the scientific inquiries of the Romantic generation to recent books by Daniel Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell, he seeks to “break down the barriers that separate science from other sources of human wisdom.” Dyson discusses twentieth-century giants of physics such as Richard Feynman, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac, and Steven Weinberg, many of whom he knew personally, as well as Winston Churchill’s pursuit of nuclear weapons for Britain and Wernher von Braun’s pursuit of rockets for space travel. And he takes a provocative, often politically incorrect approach to some of today’s most controversial scientific issues: global warming, the current calculations of which he thinks are probably wrong; the future of biotechnology, which he expects to dominate our lives in the next half-century as the tools to design new living creatures become available to everyone; and the flood of information in the digital age. Dyson offers fresh perspectives on the history, the philosophy, and the practice of scientific inquiry—and even on the blunders, the wild guesses and wrong theories that are also part of our struggle to understand the wonders of the natural world.
The Dialogue of Earth and Sky
Author: Timothy J. Knab
language: en
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Release Date: 2022-07-12
In Mexico’s Sierra Norte de Puebla, beliefs that were held before the coming of Europeans continue to guide the lives of modern Aztecs. For residents of San Martín Zinacapan, life in and on the earth is animated by the same forces, through which people seek to maintain a cohesive view of the relationship of mankind, the cosmos, and the natural world. This delicate balance of the human spirit maintains the health and well-being of villagers, and is an essential part of the social and ideological framework that makes a person’s life whole. This book describes the basic elements of a belief system that has survived the onslaught of Catholicism, colonialism, and the modern world. Timothy Knab has spent thirty years working in this area of Mexico, learning of the Most Holy Earth and following what its people there call "the good path." He was initiated as a dreamer, learned the prayers and techniques for curing maladies of the human soul, and from his long association with the Sanmartinos has constructed a thorough account of their beliefs and practices. Learning to recount dreams, forming a dreamtale, and "carrying it on one’s back" to the waking world is the first part of the practitioner’s labor in curing. But dreamtales are shown to be more than parables in this world, for they embody the ethos and cosmovision that link Sanmartinos with their traditions and the Most Holy Earth. Building on this background, Knab describes how the open-ended interpretation of dreams is the practitioner’s primary instrument for restoring a client’s soul to its proper equilibrium, thus providing a practical approach to finding and resolving everyday problems. Many anthropologists hold that such beliefs have long since disappeared into the nebulous past, but in San Martín they remain alive and well. The underworld of the ancestors, talocan or Tlalocan for the Aztecs, is still a vital part of everyday life for the people of the Sierra Norte de Puebla. The Dialogue of Earth and Sky is an important record of a culture that has maintained a precolumbian cosmovision for nearly 500 years, revealing that this system is as resonant today with the ethos of Mesoamerican peoples as it was for their ancestors.
Planetary Dreams
Author: Robert Shapiro
language: en
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Release Date: 2008-05-02
The Quest To Discover Life Beyond Earth. "The 'dreams' that I write of are not the usual ones, the images that come up in our minds involuntarily during certain stages of sleep, but rather the hopes and expectations that we have lavished upon other worlds around us."-from the Preface. The surprisingly long history of debate over extraterrestrial life is full of marvelous visions of what life "out there" might be like, as well as remarkable stories of alleged sightings and heated disputes about the probability that life might actually have arisen more than once. In Planetary Dreams, acclaimed author Robert Shapiro explores this rich history of dreams and debates in search of the best current answers to the most elusive and compelling of all questions: Are we alone? In his pursuit, he presents three contrasting views regarding how life might have started: through Divine Creation, by a highly unlikely stroke of luck, or by the inevitable process of a natural law that he terms the Life Principle. We are treated to a lively fictional dinner debate among the leading proponents of these schools of thought-with the last named group arguing that life has almost surely formed in many places throughout the universe, and the others that life may well be entirely unique to our own blue planet. To set the stage for a deep exploration of the question, the author then leads us on a fantastic journey through the museum of the cosmos, an imagined building that holds models of the universe at different degrees of magnification. We then journey deep into inner space to view the astonishingly intricate life of a single cell, and learn why the origin of such a complex object from simple chemical mixtures poses one of the most profound enigmas known to science. Writing in a wonderfully entertaining style, Shapiro then reviews the competing theories about the start of life on Earth, and suggests the debate may best be settled by finding signs of life on the other worlds of our solar system. He takes us on a guided tour of the most likely sites, from the underground hot springs of Mars to the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter's airless moons. Along the way, he shares a wealth of fascinating stories about the ways in which our views of the heavens have changed, from the theories of ancient philosphers, who argued that the Moon was inhabited, to the current Origins and Astrobiology initiatives of NASA. He describes the probes that will be sent out in the near future in pursuit of the first compelling physical evidence of life beyond Earth, and concludes with a radical suggestion about how this quest might be supported through the next millennium. As we launch into an exciting new era of space exploration, Planetary Dreams offers a thoughtful and entertaining exploration of both the history of our hopes and expectations and a vision of a possible future in which the discovery of life elsewhere will provide a new view of our place in the universe.